Thoughts On The Equality Summit's Transgender Breakout Session
by: Autumn Sandeen
Sat Jan 24, 2009 at 22:00:00 PM EST
http://pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9195Of the hundreds at the Equality Summit, about 8 of us showed up to the transgender breakout. Two of us were media.
What a tough issue this is to the trans subcommunity of the LGBT community. On one hand, many of us recognize exactly how every marriage that a transgender person enters into is considered by many to be a same sex marriage. As Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality has pointed out previously:
Every trans person who's in a relationship, regardless of what their gender is or ever was, they're either in a same-sex relationship or in an opposite sex relationships that somebody could claim was a same-sex relationship.
Some examples of how transsexuals' relationships are all seen as same-sex relationships: a lesbian relationship -- a heterosexual relationship. Loving v Virginia's declaration that marriage is a fundamental "basic civil rights of man" seems to not apply uniformly, state to state, for transsexual and transgender people; marriage equality doesn't apply to those whose gender doesn't conform to the two sex-and-gender-always-matches-sex dichotomy.
